Why You Need Audience Profiles and How To Create Them
Who is this for? It’s the first question effective creatives ask.
And yet I’ve never worked for or with an organization that has documented their key audience profiles. And I’ve worked with some big brands.
No matter how well you understand the decision-makers your communications need to inspire, if you haven’t documented that knowledge, you’re missing the best tool to grow your impact.
I get that it’s hard to slow down when you have client work to ship, two proposals due next week, an out-of-date website, and a social media feed that never sleeps. What if taking the time to document meaningful, research-based audience profiles would help you:
Identify what marketing channels and touchpoints will create results (and which you can ignore)
Clarify exactly what to say in your communications, including how and when to say it
Save meeting and editing time and reduce review rounds with team members, collaborators, and consultants
Grow your revenue and impact by focusing your communications on the people who will help you achieve your vision
Decide how to innovate and what new services or products to develop
Even if you think you know your key audiences, you won’t get the best results from your marketing plan, team, and collaborators unless they’re documented. This also ensures important audience profile details don’t exit your organization if and when the people who know them do.
So how do you create audience profiles (also known as personas) that you’ll reference time and again? Follow these four steps, which I explain below:
Identify 2-3 decision-makers
Research the mindset of each influential audience
Document your key audience profiles
Use your audience profiles to guide brand growth
Identify 2-3 decision-makers
If you’re speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one. The first step to growing your brand is to define the key decision-makers who need your service or product most. These are the people who will help you achieve your purpose. While your full stakeholder map includes everyone in your audience, your offer and message needs to resonate with the people most likely to hire you or buy your product.
When identifying the decision-makers your communications need to persuade, consider this framework from Louis Grenier of Everyone Hates Marketers:
Context → Where, when, with what, and with whom folks experience the problem you solve.
Inclusion → Are there underserved people who need your solution the most?
Subculture → What are their interests or beliefs. For example, cyclists, people who visit the library, people who volunteer, etc.
Frequency/Intensity → Which folks tend to be exposed to the problem more often and/or with more intensity than the average person.
Personal circumstances → Their health and family status.
Let’s say you’re a local child development centre in a Northern BC community that provides assessments, education, and assistance to children who require extra support in areas of physical, socio-emotional, communication and cognitive development. Your goal is to raise awareness of your services so that caregivers can get the support their kids need as soon as possible. Your communications plan might focus on three audiences: parents/caregivers, healthcare professionals, and teachers. You can get even more specific when considering which people need information about your services most: under-served new and expecting parents, pediatricians, and kindergarten teachers.
Once you’ve defined your 2-3 key audiences, you’re ready to learn more about them.
2. Research the mindset of each influential audience
Instead of creating fake “personas” using made-up demographic information (statistical characteristics like age and education level), you need to know why people need your solution in their own words. You’ll use your findings to write empathetic copy that gets attention, builds trust, and moves people to take action.
The main question you need to answer about your audience’s mindset is: what was going on in their life that lead them to search for a solution to their problem?
It’s important to start with what triggered their need, you want to go back before the day they decided to partner with you. Start by understanding when and why they first started looking for a solution, and the experience that motivated them to do so. Then, you want to know how they went about solving their problem:
What triggered them to look for a solution
Where they searched for solutions
What solutions they considered
Who they trusted for advice
What media channels they used
What made them choose your solution
What, if anything, almost prevented them from choosing your solution
How your solution helped them achieve their goals
The best way to do this is by conducting in-person or video stakeholder interviews. You can learn so much in a 15-minute conversation, especially if you can see their facial expressions.
Ideally, you have the resources to use multiple channels to learn about your audiences. You’ll also want to collect feedback annually to ensure they’re still relevant. Depending on your resources and timeline to conduct audience research, you can:
Facilitate stakeholder interviews
Unearth organizational knowledge from colleagues
Collect stakeholder feedback through surveys via text, email, websites, and/or social media
Attend an event where you can speak to your stakeholders
Search review sites or forums
Supplement with market trend data from reputable sources like Mckinsey, Deloitte, and Edelman
Once you’ve completed your stakeholder research, you’re ready to document your findings in key audience profiles. You might want to use the framework below to take notes as you conduct your research, or you can choose to distill your findings after your research is complete.
3. Document your key audience profiles
Before you document your audience profiles, try writing your findings into statements using this framework (also care of Louis Grenier).
When [trigger happens], I want to [solve problem, meet needs and wants], so I can [reach desired transformation and end goal].
Here’s a sample caregiver mindset using the same childhood development centre example.
When I’m taking my new baby home for the first time I want to understand what developmental milestones to look for as they grow so I can keep them healthy and happy.
Next, fill out the rest of your profile with no more than the most important 3-6 points per section. Why? Because you can’t remember a list larger than six. Here’s an example profile for a caregiver that the child development centre’s marketing needs to address, with a template you can fill in for your own audience.
4. Use your audience profiles to guide brand growth (and refine them as you learn more)
Now that you’ve documented your audience profiles, use them to brainstorm ideas with your marketing team (especially if that’s just you).
Here are a few ways to use your audience profiles:
Identifying your marketing plan and channels: where, when, and how you can reach your audience
Designing marketing touchpoints: what creative will you use to communicate your message
Directing photoshoots: what types of people and scenes represent your audience and tell the story
Creating content: what campaigns, web, and social media creative will be the most useful and informative
If you’re the children’s development centre, you might create a timeline graphic for developmental milestones by year, and print it on bookmarks or fridge magnets that you distribute at local community events, through birth centres and midwives, at doctor’s offices, and schools.
Impactful marketing is based on audience research, not assumption. Understanding the people you’re designing for will save you time and money investing in good ideas that don’t get you any closer to your goal. Considering how few organizations identify and document details about their key audiences, it’s also the easiest way to get ahead of your competition.
Convinced audience profiles will help you develop more effective communications? I am, too. That’s why I develop audience profiles for every organization I collaborate with. If you need help with the process, let’s talk.
